Spenderrific is a digital lifestyle magazine covering wellness, sustainable living, fashion, travel, and the everyday culture of conscious spending. The brief was to design a professional digital magazine in close collaboration with the editor-in-chief, matching the publication's broader online look.
The Challenge
The task was to establish brand loyalty and trust among Spenderrific's audience by creating a design that looks great and delivers on what readers expect. The deeper challenge was producing a layout that felt visually cohesive across wildly different lifestyle topics, while keeping each section distinct enough to give the magazine real editorial range.
Four specific design problems sat underneath that brief:
- Visual coherence across stories spanning food, travel, fashion, and culture without flattening the differences between them
- Dynamic cover design that earns the click and sets the tone for the issue's content
- Interactive multimedia treatment for the digital format, including space for embedded video and interactive graphics
- Consistent branding across colour, type, and imagery that reinforces Spenderrific's identity in every spread
Our Approach
Working in Adobe InDesign and Photoshop, we treated the magazine as a design system rather than a one-off layout. Each issue is built on shared editorial templates that the team can extend without breaking the brand. Here is what shipped for Issue 03:
- Cover system: a navy and white colour palette anchored by a large custom serif wordmark, with cover photography and pull quotes positioned to a flexible grid that adapts to each issue's lead story
- Editorial grid built around a consistent baseline, generous gutters, and a column structure that comfortably holds long-form text, full-bleed photography, and pull quotes side by side
- Multi-spread layouts for feature articles ("Healthy Living in Harmony with Nature", "The Impact of Plastic on Marine Life", "A Digital Nomad's Guide to Travelling with Dogs", "Everyday Elegance: The Kitenge Revolution") with bespoke type treatments per article
- Photography direction emphasising real people, real food, and culturally grounded imagery with strong colour stories tying each spread together
- Sectional dividers and pull quotes as visual breathing room, designed to make long reads feel paced rather than dense
- Interactive-ready layout with built-in space for embedded video frames and QR codes that bridge the print-style design to the digital reader experience
The Result
The debut issue attracted over 300 readers and 4,000 page views within the first 72 hours of launch. The design system carried into subsequent issues without requiring rework, giving the editorial team a stable visual foundation to scale the publication.
